Extend WiFi with an ESP8266

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The ESP8266 is known for it’s powerful features and performance despite its small size. However few knew it could act as a WiFi extender/repeater. From previous lessons, we learned how to make the ESP8266 act as both a station and an access point. Now we are going to use that functionality at the same time with a little twist. Unfortunately the standard firmware is not capable of forwarding packets between the local network (the network which is hosted by the ESP8266) and the intra network (the network which the esp8266 is connected to). That means we need a custom firmware which luckily someone on Github managed to do. The source code is public and open source. However, we need not edit any code. When we update the new firmware we are ready to go (almost).

Part 1: Flashing the ESP8266 with a custom firmware.

Step 1:

Start by navigating to https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater In case you have an ESP-01 navigate to folder “firmware_sdk_1.5.4” and download files ‘0x00000.bin’ and ‘0x40000.bin’. For all other boards go to folder “firmware” and download files ‘0x00000.bin’ and ‘0x10000.bin’

Step 2:

Grab an ESP8266, connect it to your computer for flashing, so you need to bring GPIO0 down by grounding it.

monitor [on|off] port: starts and stops monitor server on a given port

Now let us try to connect to our network and extend our network using the ESP8266. Our network is ‘runtimenet‘ password ‘helloruntime‘.
In order to configure the ESP the following commands should be executed.

set ssid runtimenet
set password helloruntime

Configure the AP we want to broadcast:

set ap_ssid mynewap
set ap_password newpassword
set ap_open 0
set ap_on 1

Then save the configuration to flash.

save

Now give it some time and it will connect to the network. You will also notice you can connect to its WiFi named ‘mynewap’ with password ‘newpassword’.

Make sure the ESP is connected to your main WiFi network. If so, try to connect with the ESP and once connected you should be able to access the Internet via your ESP8266.

i have the problem.
after i flash my esp8266 and when i open ide serial monitor (in arduino) my esp8266 start blinking (blue) fast and ide serial monitor stop working (it displays a lot of strange letters).
i have “NODEMCU Amica” ESP8266MOD ESP-12E MODEL VENDOR
Sorry for my english, thanks!